An exquisitely rendered voyage into the “shapelessness of a life without sleep, where days merge unbounded.”
Sleeplessness gets the Susan Sontag illness-as-metaphor treatment in this pensive, compact, lyrical inquiry into the author’s nighttime demons.
In her attempt to make sense of why she can’t sleep, Betty Trask Award–winning novelist Harvey meditates, often poetically, on a wide range of topics. Her sleep issues began in the summer of 2016. A few months later, the author had self-diagnosed “possible chronic Post Brexit Insomnia” along with the “existence of persistent panic.” She began suffering three or four nights per week of no sleep. She tried everything: sleeping aids, prescription drugs, visits to a CBT sleep clinic, acupuncture, “learning French, making mosaics, playing solitaire, doing jigsaws,” watching episodes of Poldark and The Crown, and listening to “an audio edition of Remembrance of Things Past.” Eventually, Harvey began to feel “increasingly feral, like a wild animal enduring a cage.” She stopped writing and was teaching on zero hours of sleep, and her thoughts fragmented further, a process that she captures with vivid clarity, darkly tinged yet unblurred. The author thought about writing a story about a man who, while robbing a cash machine, loses his wedding ring. It unfurls in sections, floating along in the darkness like quiet waves. “Is the story going anywhere?” Harvey asks herself. Also, is insomnia caused by fear or anxiety? “Anxiety, my hypnotherapist says; you are safe in your bed yet your heart is racing as if a tiger is present. You must learn to see that there is no tiger,” she writes. “But there is a tiger: sleep deprivation. Sleep deprivation isn’t a perceived threat but a real one, like thirst or starvation.” Finally, “one day when you’re done with it, it will lose its footing and fall away, and you’ll drop each night into sleep without knowing how you once found it impossible.” Though the narrative is a highly personal interior monologue, others who have suffered insomnia will find abundant resonance.
An exquisitely rendered voyage into the “shapelessness of a life without sleep, where days merge unbounded.”Pub Date: May 12, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-8021-4882-7
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Grove
Review Posted Online: Jan. 14, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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